Along the Path

On my most recent walk, north of Charlotte to Concord and Kannapolis, as Lawson and I pass the halfway point in this journey and begin turning back east toward the coast, I got to spend some time with the delightful Mary Newsom, of the University of North Carolina-Charlotte Urban Institute, which applies its time and study to the social, economic and environmental challenges facing communities. She's just been all involved in a project called City of Creeks, which documents the troubled treatment of the creeks that drain Charlotte.

Click and link to keepingwatch.org's excellent "Up the Creeks." It quotes Lawson!

I was looking forward to talking to her. Lawson talks constantly about creeks and rivers. "Abounding in many pleasant and delightsome rivulets," is one way Lawson describes the country around Charlotte. Elsewhere he calls the same territory full of "curious bold Creeks, (navigable for small Craft) disgorging themselves into the main Rivers, that vent themselves into the Ocean. These Creeks are well stor'd with sundry sorts of Fifth, and Fowl, and are very convenient for the Transportation of what Commodities this Place may produce." He encounters the Haw, which he calls "most pleasant," and later a river he calls the Rocky, which he also describes as "very pretty."

To these descriptions may I now add a couple images of modern creeks in the Charlotte area.

This is the Little Sugar Creek in its current status. It got its name from the Indian word "sugaw," which means "group of huts." Image taken by Nancy Pierce and provided by Mary Newsom. (http://www.cmstory.org/content/sugar-creek-or-sugaw-creek)

And here's a glimpse of the Little Sugar right up close and personal. I was standing on asphalt when I took this. This is no way to treat a river.

Not exactly "very pretty," huh.

These creeks have, you might say, industrial disease. Until the Clean Water Act of 1972, that's just how things went. Even then, the CWA focused initially mostly on point sources like factories or wastewater treatment plants.

But in recent years, the worst sources of pollution are nonpoint sources: farms and stormwater runoff. So to address the flow of silt, pollutants, and nutrients that cause algae blooms and fish kills, many places -- including the state of North Carolina -- have adopted the common-sense technique of riparian buffers. That is, they leave a strip of land along creeks and streams undisturbed, allowing the natural plants to flourish. Those plants clean water flowing through, absorbing pollutants, with the added benefits of providing wildlife habitat, sequestering carbon, and offering recreational space for kids, hikers, explorers. In North Carolina the buffer is 50 feet. Wetlands have flourished, as have rain and water gardens. Waters have improved.

So, everybody wins: planet, streams, citizens, animals. You had to figure legislators couldn't leave way better than well-enough alone, and in North Carolina you'd be right.

So think this through. Silt and fertilizer are the two scourges of modern waterways, and this change allows developers to silt up the creek while they build and then plant new stuff and fertilize it afterwards. "And that's planting stuff," said Newsom, noting that the plantings would come long after invasive plants had established footholds in the scarred creekside. Add in what any gardener worth her or his soil knows -- half of what you plant will probably die no matter what you do; establishing a garden takes years -- and you've got an unconscionable assault on the state's waterways. Given the enormous amount of development taking place in North Carolina, no sane person could claim that developers are having a tough time here due to our stringent environmental regulations. So this law looks like something between pure greed and vandalism -- stomping over the environment just because they can. And by "they" I mean the legislators who approved this offense, and you may guess for yourself which party dominates when the bill removes regulation that protects citizens and the earth, and not corporations.

Worse for pedestrians, worse for bicyclists, worse for the creeks, worse for the planet. Better for developers.

Over the last several decades North Carolina has worked hard to try to return to the "pleasant and delightsome rivulets" that Lawson saw. Looks like the current legislators don't know their Lawson. Or their history.

In my journal I at one point wrote down the series of transitions I'm making as I follow Lawson's path, seeing the vast differences between the landscape I traverse and the one he did.

Lawson left Charleston and went from ocean to marshland to river to swamp to forest, and as far as that goes so did I: a week along the Intracoastal Waterway by canoe, a day up the Santee still by canoe, then a few days messing around in the cypress-tupelo swamps of the Francis Marion National Forest and the Wee Tee State Forest as the Santee traveled northwest towards its formation at the confluence of the Wateree and the Congaree, visiting the High Hills of Santee and the 150-foot tupelos and acres of cypress knees in the swamps of the Congaree National Park.

Then it was towns. I had cake and coffee in the tiny crossroads hamlet of Jamestown and slept in the church, visiting little Randolph's Landing, the spot at the end of the road where the government plonked Lake Marion, widely regarded one of the Army Corps of Engineers' worst mistakes in history, drowning an ecosystem and its culture and damaging not only the Santee River but the Cooper River Basin, where it ships some of its water in a wrongheaded attempt to improve Charleston Harbor.

From there I walked on to the tevolutionary town of Camden, where I was treated like a king and slept in the basement of the rebuilt Kershaw House, and from there to Lancaster, where I met not only the delightful people at USC-Lancaster but the Catawba Indians themselves, who treated me as well as they had treated Lawson three centuries ago, and then on up to Pineville, the last little stop before Charlotte.

And this time I walked into Charlotte. So I've gone ocean, marsh, river, swamp, hills, town, city, and now big city. The best surprise I had in Charlotte was the sidewalks. Throughout my walk I have complained, pretty

Where the sidewalk ends. Good luck!

The engineer who designed this highway segment came from a planet where people do not have legs, they have wheels.

much constantly, about the lack of sidewalks and capacity for pedestrians to share the roads. Some of that comes simply from walking through very rural territory. But the approach to every city has meant running for my life, and approaching Charlotte from Pineville, where I stopped last time, was no different. Pineville is a little comfortable suburb, with streets and sidewalks and shops, and then you run out of sidewalk and you cross I-485 and you just pray that you stay lucky. And then you walk along a strip of soul-sucking highway with about 16,741 car dealerships (that's an estimate; I might have missed a couple)

But then an astonishing thing happens. You find yourself on South Boulevard and ... there's sidewalk. And I'm here to tell you, that for the ten-or-so miles it takes you to get into Charlotte, you have sidewalk the whole way, and for that I could just weep with gratitude.

That was hardly the first thing I noticed about Charlotte. First, even as I approached Pineville, I left for the time being any semblance of rural land, as I discussed here. Before the Charlotte metro area, everywhere I went was plantations and forests and pine tree farming and meadows: South Carolina is rural. Starting to near Charlotte, instead of hitting large areas of land and seeing cows and trees and granite, I saw an endless parade of subdivisions -- of Glen Laurels and Clairemonts, of Fox Trails and Bridge Hamptons, Farringtons and Almond Glens. Those are all names of subdivisions I jotted down as I walked past. We've all heard the famous joke that a subdivision is named after the geographical feature they bulldozed and the wildlife they killed to make it, but once you've got to Parkway Crossing (real place!) you have to understand that they're just building them faster than they can name them. I mean what's next: Don't Walk Acres? The Glen at Traffic Circle?

Which brings us to Charlotte! Charlotte's origin story is that Trade and Tryon, the main downtown crossroads, has been a crossroads for time out of mind. Tryon is pretty much the Trading Path, which I've been following (and Lawson followed) since about Camden, SC. Trade was another path, running between the Cherokee settlements to the west and the coast. At the crossroads was a Catawba settlement, and that made a great place to hang out and wait for whatever was next.

In fact, at that point Lawson met someone he didn't expect. Lawson, like me, knew he was coming into the city: "This day, we pass'd through a great many Towns, and Settlements," he says. "About three in the Afternoon, we reach'd the Kadapau King's House, where we met with one John Stewart, a Scot, then an inhabitant of James-River in Virginia ." Stewart was one of the Indian traders from the Chesapeake who made their way up and down the Trading Path, bringing European goods and returning with deerskins and furs. Stewart was waiting around with the Catawbas because a Seneca raiding party was in the area and he didn't care to travel alone. Lawson mentions that Stewart had heard of the approach of Lawson's group nearly three weeks before and had waited for him, giving a little sense of how effective Indians communicated without any help from the Internet. Stewart joined Lawson's gang and they agreed to journey forward together.

But not before Lawson irritated his host by refusing to enjoy the services of "two or three trading Girls" the Catawba King kept around for visitors. When Lawson politely declined -- and even one of his his most ready companions, who had recently woken up to learn he had been robbed by a trading girl he had enjoyed for the night, declined as well -- the king didn't like it. "His Majesty flew into a violet Passion, to be thus slighted, telling the Englishmen they were good for nothing." Still, they hung around a couple days, baking bread and otherwise preparing for their journey, which at this point began to turn eastward back towards the coast.

We ain't in rural South Carolina no more.

A chemical company on South Boulevard. Not too much industry in Charlotte though. Banks aplenty, as we could see from the skyscrapers.

Charlotte honors its history as a place where people meet to do business -- it's an enormous banking capital now, and it has some astonishing skyscrapers to show it, along with the explosive redevelopment that tends to go with prosperous Sun Belt cities. (Read this piece to learn the weird and cool backstory on how Charlotte emerged as a banking center.) It even has a fabulous light rail transit line, which made my life extremely easy. My good friend and leader Val Green helped me leave my car at the southernmost end of the line, so when I made my way into town all I had to do to get back to my car was jump on the trolley. I was glad he helped -- walking from the end of the Lynx line the extra mile back to Pineville would have been one car-dodging trip too many at the end of the day.

Walking into Charlotte up South Boulevard is a delight, though. You walk past about a million self-storage places, which along with the limitless car lots lead a visitor to the conclusion that people in Charlotte -- and I suppose all modern people -- have cars only so they can fill them with stuff, which they then dump off in warehouses. I passed a little chemical plant after walking through neighborhoods easily identifiable through signs on restaurants and roadside stores: hispanic, asian, African-American. Then as I closed in manufacturing plants-turned-upscale-living-and-shopping started dominating, and by the time I could get glimpses of downtown I was in neighborhoods that took serious coin to inhabit -- off the main drag, you could see one or two of the old millhouses remained, but almost everything else was a teardown.

Once I got into downtown it was like the Peterson's Guide to the Ecosystems of the Big Cities. Sports stadium? Check (three! minor league baseball, pro football, and pro basketball!). Adorable minipark? Check: One with a literary theme and, for some reason, spitting fish. Then there was Trade and Tryon, and though no Catawba King greeted me, I had been well treated by the Catawbas already (more about that soon!). As for trading girls, I appear to have missed that neighborhood.

We're hee-eere!

These fish take turns spitting at each other. It's pretty neat. The rest of the park is all about books.

I'm more worried about cars than raiding parties, though we'll see how that shakes out when I hit the trail again.

You got to have friends! My old friend Dan Huntley, known as Dan the Pig Man in the Kingdom of Barbecue and throughout the Charlotte area, gave me the lowdown.

So we certainly have our fusses in the Carolinas about politics and religion and college sports and all the usuals, but if you want to see the glares get steely and the gloves come off you start talking barbecue. In the eastern part of North Carolina they season their shredded pork with a vinegar-based sauce, as they believe God intended, while in the west they base the sauce with tomato, as they imagine any civilized person would do. South Carolina further complicates matters by mixing in mustard. It's mostly good-natured, but people care. A lot.

So when I could no longer ignore the fact that Lawson mentions barbecue, I went looking for the story of barbecue, that favored food of the South -- and, it turns out, the Indians.

Dan the Pig Man could not agree more. A onetime journalist and longtime lover of barbecue, he now runs a food truck and catering company and met with me in front of his headquarters off a gravel road near York, SC, built in what you might call the Rural-Palatial style.

Dan quickly dismissed any of the crazier claims for how the word "barbecue" came into the language. It came with European interaction with Caribbean and Central American native populations, who used the word "barbacoa" to describe a way of cooking that involved placing meat on a lattice of poles above a fire that kept them from cooking too quickly, enabling the heat and smoke to cure as well as cook them. Lawson spells it "barbacue" and "barbakue, but he's talking about meat smoked on a grill.

This image of Indians barbecuing fish comes from "A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia," by Thomas Harriot, published in 1590. The engravings by Theodor de Bry were fashioned after the images of John White, who made them as part of the first attempted English settlement in North America in 1585.

Dan has done enormous research on barbecue, and he sees its history as follows. In the 1500s, either pigs brought by Spanish expeditions found their way to on the island off the coast of Georgia now known as Ossabaw or they were left there purposely to remain there as a food source when the men returned. They never did, but the hogs remained and still remain. De Soto was thus responsible for the introduction of old-world hogs into the new world, which Dan sees as significant. "Old world pigs have fatback two inches thick," he says. This meant you could take the entire pig, lay it on its back on a pit of coals, and cook it. Its own hide and fat would serve as skillet and grease, enabling the entire animal to be prepared, not just the primal cuts -- the ham, the loin, the butt, and so forth -- that the Europeans would have been used to preparing. "The whole deal about barbacoa is they would gut them and use the whole animal, as opposed to the Europeans," Dan told me. Most important, says Dan, you could cook the animal without any kind of grill or other iron implement -- making this pit method of cooking perfect for pre-iron age cultures like those of the American Indians.

Barbacoa was the Caribbean word for the stilt platforms and grids of green sticks used for cooking and especially smoking the food, which rendered it safe for storage by dehydrating it and killing bacteria. Plus it made it taste good. "I talk about barbecue coming up with the pirates along the East Coast," Dan says, and it may be so. "The tradition wafted inland like hickory smoke."

Speaking of smoke, of course, that's the point: the smoke contains elements that kill bacteria and, along with the fire drying out the meat, which meant an animal could be eaten for months, rather than days. Turns out the smoke makes it taste good, too -- whether you're plucking pieces off a pit-smoked pig during a nice all-day Carolina pig-picking or eating venison in February that you killed in November. Nowadays many people use professional-grade smokers like the one Dan displays above, but you'll be invited to plenty of parties with a pig coming out of a pit -- or on a grill. One of Raleigh's best barbecue restaurants is still called The Pit.

And as much as Dan loves Carolina barbecue and its many approaches, he knows that in reality it's that simplest of things: meat + fire + smoke + time = good eating. "The great food cultures of the world start with poor people getting the poor cuts of mean," he says. "How do you tenderize it? What do poor people have a lot of? Time, wood, smoke.

"When I grew up in Charlotte in the 50s and 60s, barbecue was not an urban white thing at all," he says. It was something you went out to the poorer quarters for, and bought there. What's more, if you get right down to it, "It's meat and fire. It's animals and lightning. Barbecue started when the first wooly mammoth fell in the campfire."

Still, he sees Lawson as playing an important role with barbecue like he does with so much of Carolina and Southeastern culture. "The significance of Lawson is he didn't hang around the coast. He went into the backwoods." He witnessed all the ways Indian cultures barbecued their meat, and "I would argue that it was Lawson who first took that tradition back over the Atlantic." I didn't see a trace of barbecue when I visited Lawson's botanical specimens at the Museum of Natural History in London, but Lawson did return to England in 1709 and stay for a year. I expect he ate with some tastemakers, and if he didn't carry the message, surely his book did when it came out that year.

You can bet we'll be arguing about barbecue in the Carolinas for at least another 300 years. But as ever when it comes to the Carolinas, Lawson helped set the terms of the discussion.